Friday, September 19, 2008

Broken Axles, Hurricanes, and Power Outages… oh my

Well, the perfect storm of bad luck did its best to hold us back from going to Bonneville again, but despite Murphy’s best efforts, the car is on the trailer on its way to Bonneville.

The string of bad luck started on the drive back, when our push truck towing our equipment trailer broke down. After spending 10 days being repaired in Salt Lake City, the truck hit the road again, only this time it managed to make it to the middle-of-nowhere Wyoming before breaking down again. With the short timing of our planned return, the trailer had to sit and wait in Wyoming for us to return.

So, with our tools, generators, and resistor load bank stuck in Wyoming, the team decided our best bet would be to get the car on the Dyno at CAR, and make sure everything would be ready for Bonneville, so we got the motor installed on the dyno-stand by borrowing tools where we could.Then Hurricane Ike decided to join in the fun.

You wouldn’t think a hurricane would cause any problems here in middle of the country, but somehow the extents of the storm caused the jet stream air to dip low, and put most of Ohio in sustained winds of 70-100 MPH for about 6 hours. This knocked out power all over the state, and included us here at car.Some people in Columbus are still without power today.

Now, normally we are equipped to do all kinds of work on the Salt flats without electricty by using our generators and portable equipment, even portable internet. But that equipment was, of course, all still in the trailer.

So we borrowed generators, and wired up temporary lighting in the shop where we could, but without power the dyno could not be run.3 days later the power was restored, but then the timing was too tight and the time (and electricity) had to be used to get the car reassembled and prepped for shipping to Bonneville.

The power came back on 9:00 PM Tuesday, and most of us literally worked straight through until about 5:00 PM Thursday to get the car loaded up and back on its way to Bonneville.

Hopefully all this bad luck is behind us, it should be a great week at Bonneville!

1 comment:

Buckeye Bullet

The student run team is based out of the Center for Automotive Research at The Ohio State University. Currently the team is in the process of designing a brand new land speed vehicle. This new vehicle branded the Buckeye Bullet 3 is anticipated to be significantly faster than previous cars. In the summer of 2010, the team built a battery powered land speed streamliner (BB2.5), that broke the previous world record held by the Buckeye Bullet 1. Each of the vehicles are run on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.